GenOpp, Too: Another Group Almost Wholly Funded by Koch Network

Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce provided more than half the two-year budget of a conservative nonprofit geared toward youth that has been running controversial anti-Obamacare ads, according to tax documents obtained by OpenSecrets.org.

In the three years for which tax information is available, Generation Opportunity has raised almost 86 percent of its funds from just two Koch-linked nonprofits.

Generation Opportunity — via its wholly owned limited liability company, TRGN LLC — received $5.04 million from Freedom Partners. Both groups are linked to Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who help bankroll a network of politically active organizations that don’t reveal their donors.

The groups’ fiscal years cover different time periods, and there is no way to know, from either organization’s most recent Form 990 filings with the IRS, whether the funds were sent in more than one tranche. That seems to be the case, though, since GenOpp had a budget of about $4.1 million during its fiscal year that ended May 31, 2013, and about $4.6 million the year before that, neither of them totaling as much as the funds that came from Freedom Partners.

GenOpp has become best known for its ads featuring someone in an Uncle Sam suit who, in one case, pops up to conduct a young woman’s gynecological exam, and in another, appears to do a rectal exam on a man. The “Creepy Uncle Sam” ads urge viewers to “Opt Out,” since Obamacare can’t succeed without a large number of young, healthy people enrolled in the program. The group also sponsored at least one college football tailgate party featuring Hummers, beer pong and models with bullhorns.

According to GenOpp’s most recent Form 990 filing with the IRS, the group paid about $619,000 to six top employees in the fiscal year ending last May. One of those staffers was previously with Americans United for Life, another was with the Labor Department in the George W. Bush administration. The group’s president, Evan Feinberg, was with the Heritage Foundation and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) before joining GenOpp.

In the past, the group has been a stopping place for onetime staffers for Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) and Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), former members of the Senate and House, respectively, who subsequently became presidential candidates.

GenOpp paid almost $1 million to Facebook during the year for which it just filed its report. The group focuses its ads there and on Google, and in any case has not had to report any political spending to the FEC because it tends to run “issue ads” that don’t have to be reported.

The group also received about $4 million over the past several years from TC4 Trust, another group in the Koch network that gave out millions to other conservative 501(c)(4) organizations, some of which ran ads for or against federal candidates. TC4 Trust also funded the Kochs’ voter database initiative, Themis Trust, before going out of business in 2013.

Freedom Partners gave out more than $235 million between Nov. 2, 2011 and Oct. 31, 2012, the vast majority of it to organizations linked to the Kochs like Americans for Prosperity and the Center to Protect Patient Rights. Its board of directors includes several people with current or former links to the Kochs’ various enterprises. And while the group spent most of its first year giving out grants to other like-minded nonprofits, it is now hiring staff and running ads of its own.

Washington reporter Viveca Novak joined the Center in December 2011 as editorial and communications director; her duties include running the OpenSecrets Blog, fielding press inquiries and developing media partnerships. Viveca has been deputy director of FactCheck.org and a Washington correspondent for Time magazine and The Wall Street Journal. She has won a number of journalism awards, including Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. In 2014, she was awarded, with colleague Robert Maguire, the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service in Online Journalism for a series of stories published on OpenSecrets Blog. In 2005, she co-authored a book, "Inside the Wire," about the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo. Viveca has a degree in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University; in addition, she completed a Fellowship in Law for Journalists at Yale Law School.

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